Mapcap Flare – structure bars demo

Mapcap Flare put another demo on their site a while back. This one is about "structure bars" which is Madcap's way of showing the element structure of a document:

http://madcapsoftware.com/products/demos.asp#

My thoughts on this demo are mixed.

My immediate thought was what a dull demo it is without sound. Well, in fact it does have sound, the sound of mouse clicks, but not speaking. Having looked at a lot of screencasts recently (particularly those of Jon Udell) silent demos like this with balloon text that you need to read are just so dull and lifeless. Compare it with Robert Scoble's off-the-cuff interview of, and Office 12 demo, by Julie Larson-Green for Channel9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114720

My next thought was that I was pleased to see the structure feature being touted as a product feature and being included in a well thought-out and nicely designed way. However, I'm also a little bit concerned because one of my fears about Flare is that it feels like it might be being developed with the same dummed-down, "let's keep it simple for the users (they won't understand anything that's not graphical or drag-and-drop)" approach that plagued early versions of RoboHelp. Only latterly did RoboHelp start to escape this "we know better than you, so we'll do stuff for you (whether you want it or not)" mentality. In my experience the main users of RoboHelp (and in the future Flare) are technical authors who know all about XML and XHTML and CSS and JavaScript and header files. I'm a little worried that Flare might be very good-looking application that doesn't offer much in the way of functionality we don't already have. What I'm hoping for is an application that maybe won't be that single-source solution we're all looking for, but will be a key component of a single-source solution.

When it comes to ways of showing the structure of a document that's one thing that FrameMaker 7 does well. I really like the variety of ways FrameMaker has of showing structure: in an expand/collapse diagram, as tagged text, as text with element markers, in the status bar, etc.

I don't want to be negative about Flare before I've even seen it, but we're at this pivotal point as technical authors, with both of our main tools (FrameMaker and RoboHelp) being left to wither and die, and a huge need for a new kind of tool to deliver on the list of requirements that technical authors have for a new tool - requirements we know can be delivered built on XML. When I first heard about Madcap I pinned significant hopes on it being the company to deliver the killer app for our profession. I hope they can, but the more I hear about Flare the more I worry that it's just going to be a new version of RoboHelp, rather than the successor to RoboHelp and FrameMaker.